In 2007, supported by an extraordinary team of family, friends, and medical staff, I stomped the snot out of a nasty cancer that was on its way to killing me. I've since learned that the way I did it has a lot in common with the advice of the "e-patients" movement, so I've changed my blogger name from Patient Dave to e-Patient Dave.

Saturday, November 8, 2008

My wife steered me to this wonderful new book, Anticancer: A New Way of Life by Dr. David Servan-Schreiber of Carnegie-Mellon University. (He also happens to be founder of the US branch of Medecins Sans Frontiers (Doctors Without Borders).)

He's an MD who had a real bummer one night in the lab. To run a test, he stuck himself in the MRI, and sorta kinda got a rude surprise: glioblastoma in his skull.

He beat it (with surgery and chemo) and figured it proved he was invincible. In 5 years it came back. He beat it again, but this time he decided to look for protection that goes beyond what his medical peers had been telling him.

He found a terrific amount of decently done research about stuff that interferes with tumor growth, or a least doesn't encourage growth, as much of our common diet does. (I'm not talking about la-la stuff, like the person who told me last May that all I needed was properly ionized water. I'm talking about solid biological stuff.)

I hope to write more about several mind-benders from the book, but here's my current favorite: dark chocolate is an anticancer food.

Not milk chocolate, not white chocolate, just dark chocolate, at least 70% cacao. Here's the American Cancer Society page on it (very non-technical).

Yes, friends, "chocolate therapy" isn't just a chick-flick thing. So when I was in San Francisco last week I walked into a Ghirardelli Chocolate store and tanked up: they had a Buy 4 Bars, Get One Free sale.

Funny how rapidly 5 big bars of chocolate can disappear, though.

Now to see if I can submit it to my Section 125 Health Spending Account...

(The other new favorites I've gotten from the book are green tea (green as in unfermented), turmeric, and fresh berries. Oh, and fish and margarine and eggs with omega-3's, not omega-6. These are all things I've heard people jabber about for ages, but somehow until this book, it never sank in that I could influence my odds by eating these things. MUCH simpler than Interleukin.)